Kaczynski’s Old Montana Home on Way to Court

The government has loaded Theodore Kaczynski’s cabin onto a truck and is sending it from a Montana Air Force base to Sacramento, California, where the Unabomber suspect’s defense team will use the 10-by-12-foot shack as evidence about their client’s state of mind.

The FBI seized the structure, which Kaczynski lived in for more than two decades before his arrest in April 1996, from its site outside Lincoln, Montana. It has been stored at Malmstrom Air Force Base near Great Falls – 1,100 miles from Sacramento.

Kaczynski is on trial on 10 charges related to four Unabomber attacks, two of which killed men in Sacramento. Federal prosecutors, citing evidence seized in the shack, allege that the Harvard mathematics graduate and former University of California professor is responsible for the 17-year series of bomb attacks that began in 1978.

The cabin plays a different role for Kaczynski’s attorneys, who say it speaks eloquently about their client’s privation and isolation. “You really cannot understand this guy’s life unless you can get in that cabin,” lead defense attorney Quin Denvir has said.

Meanwhile, jury selection continues in the US District Court in which Kaczynski will be tried. Fifty-four people have been qualified as potential jurors. When another 10 are chosen, jurors and alternates will be selected.

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Site for a strongman: Hun Sen, who seized power from his Cambodian co-prime-minister earlier this year and instituted what in Phnom Penh terms was a brief reign of terror to eliminate opponents, is claiming his place on the World Wide Web.

Agence France-Presse reported today that the Cambodian People’s Party is launching a site telling about the good things it and its leader have done for the world. The scintillating inaugural feature will be the text of a speech by party president Chea Sim celebrating the 19th anniversary of the anti-Khmer Rouge resistance.

Another official told the French news agency the site, in English, is intended as a response to the bad press generated when Hun Sen’s troops routed soldiers loyal to First Prime Minister Norodom Ranariddh last summer. Hun Sen’s troops also were reported to have tracked down Norodom supporters and executed them.

Party functionary Svay Sitha acknowledged that few people in computer-scarce Cambodia would get to enjoy the site. But that’s beside the point, he added, since the purpose is to show foreigners that the party is OK.

“Our policy is to get as many friends as possible,” he said. (2.Dec.97)

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